Beloved icon of Windows history appears to be in the rear view for good

For those upset about the lack of a start button in Windows 8, prepare yourself for another disappointment -- "Windows Blue", an upcoming short-cycle successor to Windows 8, is not expected to bring the feature back.

The source of this supposed leak is CNBeta, a site with close insider ties at Microsoft Corp. (MSFT), which gained respect by accurately leaking a number of early Windows 8 details.

Other info from the site includes suggests that Microsoft will further flatten the UI on the desktop (think the Metro/Windows 8 UI style), the taskbar/desktop will get tweaks, the price will be low (or free), and the new kernel version number will be v6.3 (corroborated by other independent reports). The final remnants of the Aero UI, which was a staple of Windows Vista and Windows 7 is also being bid adieu, like the Start button before it.

The start button went the way of the Dodo with Windows 8. [Image Source: Jason Mick/DailyTech]

Neowinreports that a summer launch of Windows Blue is expected. And its contacts close to Microsoft hint that the name will be some sort of riff on Windows 8, not Windows 9, as some suspected.

(For the record you can get a Start Menu-like menu by moving your mouse to the lower left corner of the screen and right-clicking. Voilà, magic!)

At my location we have hundreds of T410, T420, T430, W500, W510 and W520 laptops. We installed Win8 Enterprise for 3 dozen users and the response was so negative that every single one of those users wanted Win7 back.

When informed that their systems would integrate with new Microsoft surface tablets, the most common answers were "what is Surface?" followed by "Will it integrate with the iPad?".

Sorry all of you fanbois, but Microsoft failed at both the overall design of Windows 8 and marketing Windows 8 to the masses. They can force it on OEMs to sell it, but it will do nothing but drive more customers to keep Windows 7 or even defect to Mac or Linux.

Valve hedging their bets with porting Steam and their games to Linux was prescient, and other big companies like Blizzard are now also considering it as a hedge.

Games are literally the only thing I have Windows for right now. My work desktop runs OS X, my phone and tablet run iOS, and my Kindle runs whatever custom Linux install my Kindle runs. If Microsoft keeps screwing up and some Linux desktop catches up with Windows 7 while game developers continue pushing to make Linux work (and right now Source games run better on Linux than they do Windows 7), then what's to say that a few more people won't change over?

At best Microsoft will be keeping their Windows 7 customers, and that's money I gave them way back in 2009.

Interesting thing: right now the number of Windows 8 installs on Steam's statistics page is lower than the number of Windows Vista installs. I know its only been a few weeks, but oof.